Seafood fraud — the mislabeling of fish sold in supermarkets and restaurants — has been identified by various researchers as a rampant problem.

But a story by The Boston Globe, part of a special report not-too-surprisingly called “Fishy Business,” dives into many of the reasons.

It reports that lax government oversight, industry indifference and outright deceit, a long supply chain and consumer ignorance allow lower-quality, less expensive fish to be mislabeled and sold as pricier species.

DNA testing performed for the Globe, which conducted a five-month investigation, revealed that nearly half of 183 fish samples collected at restaurants and supermarkets in the Boston area were not the species ordered. For example, tilapia stood in for red snapper, and farmed hybrid bass was identified as wild striped bass.

Some suppliers implicitly or overtly encourage seafood misrepresentation, according to restaurateurs and their employees. One of the tactics involves using different names in invoices for one species of fish. The story cited suppliers that sometimes described escolar, which can cause digestion problems, as white tuna or albacore – more palatable and pricier fish.

Regulatory loopholes, meanwhile, let the mislabeling persist. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has primary responsibility for ensuring that fish is safe, sanitary and properly labeled. Although growing concern over mislabeling has prompted FDA officials to develop a pilot program that will use new DNA technology to identify fish, the agency has not made seafood labeling a priority.

Two other agencies share responsibility for detecting and preventing seafood fraud – U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the National Marine Fisheries Service – but there is little collaboration between them and the FDA, the Government Accountability Office has found.

In contrast, federal responsibility for the monitoring of the meat and poultry industries is solely the responsibility of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The agency has more inspectors than the FDA, 8,000 versus 1,100, and fewer processing plants to check, 6,200 versus 167,000.

The FDA also falls short in checking the safety of imports, which often come from China and Thailand and account for more than 80 percent of all seafood eaten in the U.S. As FairWarning reported in July, tons of that fish is laced with chemicals banned from the U.S. food supply, including carcinogens. But state officials say the tainted imported fish nevertheless is winding up on American dinner plates.

U.S. labor investigators recovered $240.8 million in back wages for American workers last year amid an intensified crackdown on pay abuses in low-skill industries.

That newly released total – which reflects the amount of back wages that employers agreed to pay, or were ordered to pay, following government investigations – amounted to $890 per affected worker.

However, a recent report prepared for the Labor Department suggests that the back wage recoveries only scratch the surface of what underpaid workers actually are owed.

The report by Eastern Research Group, issued in December, estimated that in California and New York alone, minimum wage violations in 2011 cost workers at least $32.7 million a week—or about $1.7 billion a year. At least 50,000 families in the two states suffered income losses due to minimum wage violations, and at least 14,800 families were brought below the poverty level, the report found.

An attempted crackdown on wage and hour violations on two Oregon berry farms has ended in a retreat by the U.S. Labor Department, which dropped all charges against two growers it had accused of failing to pay the minimum wage to about 1,000 workers.

The case has brought scrutiny to one of the Labor Department’s most potent weapons—the “hot goods” provision of federal law that allows it to halt the interstate shipment of goods produced in violation of wage laws. It is often used to fight alleged wage theft in the garment industry, among others.

With an estimated $5.5 million dollars worth of highly perishable blueberries on the line, the Oregon farms–Pan American Berry Growers and B&G Ditchen LLC–were threatened with a court order during their 2012 harvest. It would have barred them from shipping their produce unless they paid back

A father and his 2-year-old son at a gun rights demonstration last March in Austin, Texas (Photo by Erika Rich)

After being thwarted in Congress following the 2012 school shooting rampage in Newtown, Conn., gun control activists have scored some important victories in states around the country.

One of the biggest wins came in Washington State. In November, voters by a wide margin approved a state ballot measure extending, to gun shows and other private firearms transactions, a requirement for buyer background checks.

But which side has the momentum in the struggle around the nation pitting advocates of tighter controls against supporters of expanded gun rights? That remains a tough call.

With the clash now a state-by-state fight, the dueling camps make competing claims about who has gained ground and who figures to fare better in the years immediately ahead.